Doing Things in Real Time

As you are reading this, thousands upon thousands of important things are happening in projects funded by donors and implemented by implementing agencies all over the world. The relationship between them is governed by a contract that basically defines that the implementer gets funded and, every so often, sends a report to the funder.

The truth is, it is really hard for donor to invest their resources in efficient and effective impact that they can understand and measure in real time. Once invested, it is impossible to manage and adjust investment, based on results. Meanwhile, incumbent implementers and donors are large and expensive. This leads to drowning out of smaller donations and is a barrier for innovation in the sector. Also, it means that the whole sector is risk-adverse and closed to innovation.

At Triggerise we really believe it is time to change all that.

Let’s imagine you are funding reproductive health services in Kenya.

How many active providers are reached by your funding? How many clients did each and every one of the see today? Were the patients satisfied with the service they received? What family planning methods did her clients choose? Were they referred or did they walk in? If they were referred, how long did they wait before going to the visit? Do you think there is a point in time after which the probability of a client going to the visit drops critically? If such point exists, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could send her a reminder just before?

At Triggerise, we don’t need to run expensive, months long surveys to answer these questions or act on them. Instead, we have access to this data – and a lot more! – in real time.

All interactions powered by Triggerise are recorded the moment they take place. We immediately have access to details such as time, location, person, and other specifics of the interaction. This means that everything that happens in our field operations can be measured and evaluated instantly.

We can even build predictive models that run automatically whenever a set of variables occur: the reminder sent before someone is likely to forget about their referral. The reward that gets paid to the referring community health worker when someone walks into a clinic.

Call it big data if you want. But this continuously growing wealth of real-time data provides us with unprecedented insights into consumer behaviors, the effects of subsidies, the efficiency of delivery methodologies, operational details, the quality of outputs and so much more.

We can quickly test behavioral hypotheses with A/B testing, trials or panels and use immediate feedback to continuously optimize our operations. Triggerise puts these insights at the core of our business model, and we believe that the wider development community will benefit from having access to them as well.